By Elin Spring
Are you longing for a journey? There has been a lot of press about “Covid backlash,” with people clamoring for adventure after feeling penned in for so long. This month, your mind can take some unique excursions without leaving town. Gallery Kayafas is featuring three photography exhibits that probe life’s passages: Emily Belz’s two series, “He Hid His Face Amid a Crowd of Stars” and “Duet”, Vanessa Leroy’s “as our bodies lift up slowly” and Bill Franson’s “Landscape in Blue.” On view through March 18th, 2023, there will be a First Friday Reception with the artists on March 3rd from 5:30 – 8:00 pm.
Feature Image: “Untitled” 2017-2019, from the series He Hid His Face Amid a Crowd of Stars, by Emily Belz, courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kayafas, Boston.
In her two series, Emily Belz creates visual metaphors for the fluctuating, unpredictable and often conflicting forces that shape our lives. As a sailor, Belz has found “photographic muses” in the cadence of the sea, its changing reflections of light and surface patterns. The ocean has always offered a ready allegory for life, with its capricious moods and conditions that can shift from tranquil to terrifying in a matter of minutes.
“Untitled” 2017-2019, from the series He Hid His Face Amid a Crowd of Stars, by Emily Belz, courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kayafas, Boston.
“Untitled” 2017-2019, from the series He Hid His Face Amid a Crowd of Stars, by Emily Belz, courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kayafas, Boston.
It was in the tumult of one such storm that Belz learned of her father’s sudden death and her image making at sea became the poignant tribute, “He Hid His Face Amid a Crowd of Stars.” In this exhibit, her pictures float across an expansive pale grey wall painted to depict a horizonless, foggy ocean. The singular focus of each subdued image invokes life’s fragility and transience, from an impressionistic, rain-pelted coastline to a magnetic starlit abstraction to a crown of fine hair shining in moonlight. The installation forms a peaceful whole in Belz’s moving reconciliation with forces beyond our control.
“Untitled” 2017-2019, from the series He Hid His Face Amid a Crowd of Stars, by Emily Belz, courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kayafas, Boston.
“Purple Door” 2022, from the Duet series by Emily Belz, courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kayafas, Boston.
In Belz’s series “Duet,” each frame contains a conversation between exterior and interior spaces around her wooded home. They are metaphors, as ethereal as the four suspended silk prints included in this exhibit. Her photographic prints display an innovative and sometimes offbeat interplay of vivid hues and hushed light. The vertical format of the pairs invites a sparkling dialog of patterns that can ignite or placate the spirit. Created in isolation during the pandemic, “Duet” has the sensation of stilling time and nurturing passage to a sense of balance.
“Trout Pond at Golden Hour” 2021, from the Duet series by Emily Belz, courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kayafas, Boston.
“Bèl Papiyon” 2021, from the series as our bodies lift up slowly by Vanessa Leroy, courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kayafas, Boston.
Vanessa Leroy’s large installation of work is, in fact, an intimate diary of remembered and dreamt passages excerpted from the journal of her evolving identity. Her earliest childhood memories as a Haitian Catholic segue into her coming of age in the United States as a Black queer artist.
“You and I” 2021, from the series as our bodies lift up slowly by Vanessa Leroy, courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kayafas, Boston.
Leroy’s jumble of transitions and emotions is manifested in the myriad creative techniques in her imagery, from analog methods like gelatin silver prints, to digital photographs and transfers, to mixed media collages. Haitian flowers, maps, and vintage snapshots, along with cyanotype prints that reference its Indigo export trade, share symbolic space with her current, pensive self-portraits and those of loved ones.
“Dark Spring, Part Two” 2021, from the series as our bodies lift up slowly by Vanessa Leroy, courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kayafas, Boston.
Many images are marvelously layered, like the mysterious chrysalis of “Becoming.” Leroy’s assembly is as encompassing as it is fragmentary, creating a quilt with threads that transport her entrenched memories into an imagined future “as our bodies lift up slowly.”
“Becoming” 2019, from the series as our bodies lift up slowly by Vanessa Leroy, courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kayafas, Boston.
“Waldingfield” 2018, from the series Landscape in Blue by Bill Franson, courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kayafas, Boston.
Cast in tranquil hues of cyanotype, Bill Franson’s “Landscape in Blue” is a passage back in time to childhood pastures. Returning to woods and fields he wandered as a boy in Appleton Farms (Ipswich, MA), Franson brought a wood field camera, a measured pace and a decades-older perspective on life. His 4”x 5” images are contact printed in the ancient cyanotype process, an apt tribute to the knotty, venerable trees he pictures.
“Oak, the Great Pasture”, 2018, from the series Landscape in Blue by Bill Franson, courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kayafas, Boston.
Franson’s trees are at once timeless sentries to the land and individual characters, as shaped by nature’s forces as we are. Lyrical in form and nostalgic in feeling, each cyanotype is hand-framed in maple wood indigenous to this area. The intimate scale of Franson’s arboreal scenes is mesmeric, inviting viewers to enter a dreamlike world.
“From Waldingfield to the Plains” 2018, from the series Landscape in Blue by Bill Franson, courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kayafas, Boston.
For more information on these exhibits, go to: https://www.gallerykayafas.com/
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